Sad demise of an Iron Lady: Margaret Thatcher's children ignore her again as only intervention of housekeeper saves her from spending Christmas alone

With the Caribbean sun blazing down from a clear blue sky, Sir Mark Thatcher was on sparkling form this week at one of the most exclusive addresses in Barbados.

Sipping cocktails at the £1,800-a-night Sandpiper Hotel, Sir Mark, whose fortune was once estimated at £64million before his dramatic fall from grace over his role in an illegal African coup, was talking about his next big venture.

The son of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, is buying a multi-million-pound property on the island, where he rubs shoulders with the likes of Simon Cowell, Cilla Black and Sir Cliff Richard.

Frail: Mrs Thatcher is helped to her door in 2011. The Iron Lady became increasingly frail in her later years

While Sir Mark soaks up the Christmas sun in Barbados for the second year running, his twin sister Carol was getting into the Yuletide spirit in the Swiss resort of Klosters.

Carol, who has been living in Madrid, where she is learning Spanish, is staying with her former partner, ski instructor Marco Grass. They spent Christmas with friends. Last Christmas, Carol, who loves to travel, was in Italy staying with Lord McAlpine, the former Treasurer of the Tory Party, who is a close friend of her mother.

Missed: Lady Margaret Thatcher can go six weeks without a visit from her son Mark, who spent the festive break in Barbados

As for Lady Thatcher, 86, who is increasingly frail and forgetful after suffering a series of minor strokes, she was expected to spend Christmas at home alone, again, with just Kate, her faithful housekeeper and carer, for company.

It is the second year running that the former Prime Minister, whose political life is the subject of a contentious new film The Iron Lady starring Meryl Streep, spent Christmas Day separated from her children in her elegant home in London’s Belgravia.

Although she is increasingly confused and forgetful, it will surely have been painfully obvious to the former PM that she was spending the festive period without her children once again.

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There is a small artificial Christmas tree, complete with twinkling lights, in one corner of her elegant drawing room. It is here where she spends most of her days listening to music and entertaining the small but loyal group of friends who still call round.

There are Christmas cards on the mantelpiece from her children and closest friends. Hundreds more from well-wishers fill her office at the House of Lords.

There are also countless invitations.
But these are increasingly difficult because Lady Thatcher now suffers
acute short-term memory loss which leaves her unsettled at public
gatherings. It’s why trips beyond her home are severely restricted.

To
try to fill the yawning gap left by her two children’s absence on
Christmas Day, her police protection officers agreed to visit Lady
Thatcher for a glass of fizz before she sat down to a traditional lunch
with Kate. She then planned to watch the Queen’s Christmas broadcast.

But then, suddenly, she received a
late invitation from a member of the Thatcher family. Not from either of
her children, though. It was from Lady Thatcher’s niece Jane Mayes, the
only daughter of her older sister Muriel, who died aged 83 after a long
illness in 2004.

Muriel was the older of the two sisters by four years. Curiously her future husband, farmer Billy Cullen, first went out with the young Margaret. But when Margaret introduced him to Muriel at a Conservative dance in Colchester, he transferred his affections to the elder sister. Lady Thatcher was happy to be a matchmaker.

Although they were rarely seen in public together, Lady Thatcher valued her sister for telling her the truth. Muriel once said: ‘Margaret has said: “My sister is my best friend.” What she means by that is that I tell her what I really think.’

Frail: Margaret Thatcher, then 35, pictured here with Carol and Mark, aged 6, now suffers from memory loss and cannot make many trips beyond her home

When Jane, who is a senior employee in
the personnel and development office at the Methodist Church HQ in north
London, discovered only days before Christmas that her aunt was going
to be alone, she immediately changed her own plans.

Lady Thatcher and her carer Kate were invited to join Jane, her husband, and her father on Christmas Day at their family home in north-east London.

‘It was a late invitation and a very welcome one,’ says a friend of Lady Thatcher. ‘Kate accompanied her and they had a lovely day. It was very quiet. Very peaceful. But very special.’

Lady Thatcher, who is a deeply committed Christian, thoroughly approves of her niece’s career choice.

Her own father, grocer Alfred Roberts, was also a Methodist lay preacher. He even met Lady Thatcher’s mother Beatrice through the church, which he attended every Sunday.

Far apart: Carole Thatcher, who can go 6 months without visiting her mother, spent Christmas in the Swiss resort of Klosters

The friend added: ‘Lady Thatcher was
very fond of Muriel, who was a wonderful mother and sister. They used to
meet on a regular basis before Lady T became Conservative leader.

‘She
was a very direct person, just like Lady T. You knew exactly where you
were with both of them. So it was lovely for her to be able to spend
some time with Muriel’s daughter.’

Yet the unexpected Christmas with her
niece can’t paper over the cracks in her difficult relationship with her
two children - which is the cause of deep concern within the former
PM’s inner-circle.

In the Meryl Streep film about the
former PM ‘The Iron Lady’, which opens in Britain next week, Carol is a
regular at her mother’s home. In real life, the reverse is true.
Although Carol made a flying trip to see her mother the week before
Christmas, she can go six months without visiting.

In fairness, Carol was always much closer to her father Denis, who died in 2003 at the age of 88. While
she wrote an affectionate biography of him, she opened up a rift with
friends of her mother when in 2008 she wrote another book, A Swim-On
Part In The Goldfish Bowl, which was peppered with anecdotes about her
mother’s descent into dementia.

It had been a badly-kept secret for some time that Lady Thatcher’s once-formidable intellect has been dulled by the onset of the terrible disease. Carol wrote: ‘Sometimes she struggles with words and can’t recall what she had for breakfast.’ At a lunch party she revealed how her mother confused the Falklands War, her finest hour, with the Bosnian conflict.

But what caused the biggest fracture with Lady Thatcher’s friends, was Carol’s revelation that our most successful Prime Minister regularly has to be told that Denis, the rock on which her entire married and political life was built, is dead. When reminded of the agonising loss, Lady T would look baffled and ask if the family was with him when he died: ‘Oh, were we all there?’

The film The Iron Lady focuses heavily on Lady Thatcher’s continuing battle with dementia, and is based around a series of imagined conversations with her dead husband.

Frail: Lady Margaret Thatcher - pictured hear leaving for a birthday lunch with the help of her son Mark and daughter-in-law Sarah on her 86th birthday - became increasingly frail in her later years

Lady Thatcher is much closer to her son,
even though he has been a constant source of anxiety. Sir Mark was at
the centre of an international scandal over his involvement in an
attempt to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea and install a
new regime. In 2005 he was fined £500,000 and given a four-year
suspended sentence in South Africa after admitting to helping to finance
the plot - although he denied knowing what the money was to be used
for.

It was Lady Thatcher who wrote the cheque for £265,000 to free him from house arrest. The much-publicised travails of her son cannot have helped his mother’s health.

Sir Mark, who now lives in Spain, usually visits his mother once every four to six weeks, and last visited a month ago.

But in the increasingly prolonged
absences of Mark and Carol, the friends of Lady Thatcher have rallied to
try to fill in the gaps. Shortly before the Christmas holidays she had
lunch at the House of Lords with Lord [Kenneth] Baker who was chairman
of the Tory Party in November 1990, when she was toppled from office.
Lord Forsyth, the former Scottish office minister and one of her most
devoted supporters, was also present.

Long-distance: Carol, seen with her mother in the Royal Box at Wimbledon in 2004, now lives in Madrid

Apart: Mark spent his second Christmas away from his mother, who spent the holiday with her niece

The
nearby Goring Hotel, where Kate Middleton and her family stayed the
night before her wedding, continues to be Lady Thatcher’s favourite for
small lunch parties.

Sir
Bernard Ingham, who was her Downing Street press secretary, is a
regular visitor, along with Alison Wakeham. Her husband John, the former
Cabinet minister, was badly injured in the IRA bomb which killed his
first wife Roberta at the Grand Hotel in Brighton 1984.

Dame Sue Tinson, a former boss at ITN, and Conor Burns, the MP for Bournemouth West, are also regulars. Cynthia Crawford, nicknamed Crawfie, who was Lady Thatcher’s personal assistant in the Downing Street years, remains very close. Jeffrey and Mary Archer also visit.

As for Mark and Carol, Lady Thatcher still looks forward to their visits and they are the main beneficiaries of her will. After all, she has earned millions from her memoirs and speaking on the international lecture circuit.

In her great days, Margaret Thatcher delivered some memorable speeches and one-liners, which will live on long after she is gone. Now, as she prepares to see in another New Year alone, one poignant quote stands out.

‘Christmas,’ she said, ‘is a day of meaning and traditions, a special day spent in the warm circle of family and friends.’ If only her children agreed.